Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  Bloat is a desperate and sudden condition, in which the bowel somehow twists and cuts off digestion, quickly becoming gangrenous, killing within an hour. I never quite got the details right, but Victor’s call is indelibly etched in the fault zone of my brain. Puck was still in surgery, but they thought they’d got it in time. The hour’s wait for the post-op call was unbearable, like waiting for test results in the AIDS ward—what fresh hell were we entering now? Winston took it harder than I. In terror and anguish he kept repeating we needed all four of us dogs intact—or how would we ever mount the constant struggle with the horrors of AIDS? I understood exactly what he meant: the human/canine magic circle somehow kept us safe, no breaks in the line permitted or we were lost.

  Puck came through it fine. And next day Winston and I drove eight hours straight through the buffeting wind and rain so we could see him during the one-hour window of time allowed for “family visits.” We found him still very groggy in his cage, a fifteen-inch incision in his belly, but managing a plucky wag when he recognized us. Twenty-four hours later he was fully alert and clamoring for release—Get me out of this place!—and dashed that we had to leave him for another night of observation.

  In other words, an AIDS emergency with a happy ending for once, even if the virus wasn’t directly implicated. Puck has lived out his thirteenth year—in dog years a veritable Methuselah—without further incident. He is more than just a little deaf now, can’t roam the canyon on his own anymore. The Kings Road doghouse has accommodated him with a fenced-in yard and security gate. His perch is the same at the top of the outside stairs. He keeps watch, his hearing loss having tripled the decibel count of his warning bark. People who pass the house, trudging uphill, cross the road to the other side so as not to get him started.

  My own bark has grown softer of late, but that’s because I’ve already scared off most of that class of intruders and trespassers who get too close. For all of that, my rage at my lost country is undiminished, but I choose my shouting matches carefully these days, husbanding my energy and adrenaline for the war going on inside me. Meanwhile, the dying continues unabated. Michael Callen gone three weeks ago—mid-song as it were—after twelve years in the trenches. In yesterday’s Times an obit for my friend Dan Bailey, one of the founding fathers of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the gentlest man imaginable, and there is no one I can call for details because all of our mutual acquaintance is dead.

  Three weeks, two dead—two more lost from the magic circle. Or, to put it another way, two more rocks flung at the vast glass house of the world’s complacency—falling short as usual. But then the numbers of the disappeared are relative at best, and buried in a thicket of lies they call statistics. Or, as Randall Jarrell put it succinctly, counting the bodies of another war:

  We died on the wrong page of the almanac …

  When we died they said, “Our casualties were low.”2

  As for my own losses, the pile of bodies is hardly countable anymore except in the heart—because the dead outnumber the living now. Personally, that is.

  Which brings me to the subtitle of this book, in the interest of providing context. Just after the ’93 March on Washington, I had a call from the pukka sahib of a prominent national weekly, asking if I would care to write a piece on the week’s events. I said it was the very thing I was planning to do next, but demurred that I was probably looking at fifty pages and two months’ work. Not news enough by then—not hot enough—for their purposes, I imagined. She quickly countered that time and length were not a problem. I should send it along once it was finished to my satisfaction. She assured me she was a great admirer of my work.

  Flush from so much flattery, I nevertheless replied with a poke of irony. Maybe she hadn’t heard, I told her, but her staff had already rejected two of the essays, “Gert” and “My Priests.”

  “Who did that?” she retorted, a bit defensive, clearly having been left out of the loop. “And why?”

  “They said my work was too personal.” Oh, she didn’t like that at all, but then I hadn’t the least idea who the editorial culprits were. And besides, this whole exchange had put me in a state of merry bonhomie. “It’s all right, really,” I assured her. “You have to understand that I spent twenty years being turned down because my work was considered ‘too gay.’ Which I came to regard as a compliment, and proof I was on the right track.”

  Now, due to the geometric growth of the literature of my people—not to mention the imprimatur of the National Book Award—I had presumably outlived any lingering curse at being so dismissed. Except now I’d become “too personal,” which I couldn’t help but feel was even better than a compliment. For I grew up in a culture in which the personal was verboten, especially in polite company—a company I’ve long since sold my stock in. So what looked like another rejection slip was as much a cause for celebration.

  I don’t know that she followed the logic there, being as her calls on hold were clamoring like hungry dogs. Ever gracious nevertheless, she urged me on and told me please to always keep them in mind.

  But in fact the real dismissal has come from much closer to home. It’s probably no surprise, but the gay and lesbian nation has lately spun off a particularly nasty subspecies of Neo-Con dissent. A sourpuss brand of critic who rejects the very notion of “gay.” Their homosexuality, they say, is the least of their defining characteristics, rather like having brown eyes instead of blue. Thus they disdain gay pride and its carnival exuberance, and find our politics rude and out of bounds, especially the unseemly spread of the gay “subculture.” For God’s sake, can’t we be more discreet? No wonder so many decent people hate us.

  These are exclusively the views of conservative men, who are the first to admit they cannot speak for lesbians, since they don’t know any. Of course they imply that AIDS is all our own subcultural fault, and just deserts for our libertine ways. But which of us is the stereotype here? The meek and proper clerks and choirboys, undercooked and undisclosed, assimilationist at all costs? Don’t ask, don’t tell so deeply engrained, they can sport it as a serial tattoo when the camps are ready.

  No sense of the multifaceted community we have forged, or the systems we have put in place to care for our own, or the common vow we have made to stop the silence. They’re welcome to their free speech, of course, and welcome to rub shoulders with the pundits and think-tankers of the right, as well as the church supper crowd of the Christian Reich. Time alone will tell whether resistance or collaboration is more in our best interests as a people. For the present, by all means let them be not gay, not gender-variant, not ghettoized, with nary a sequin to betray them. Prim and smug and Puritan by choice, far removed from any culture that smacks of sub.

  But I give them fair warning that I for one am taking it all personally—too personally, in fact. Keeping a file of mealiness, of pandering to creeps, of accommodation with the enemy. I don’t really have the choice to ignore it, because it’s happening on my watch.

  1. From a news release by the Episcopal News Service, quoted in an interview with Jef&ey Penn, Assistant News Director.

  2. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), page 145.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to express his gratitude for the good graces of several people who gave invaluable support and inspiration to the writing of this book. Frontiers (and especially its editor, David Kalmansohn), where “Puck” first appeared. Merloyd Lawrence, for generously sharing her memories of Aunt Gert. Tad Mosel, for his definitive life of Katharine Cornell—Leading Lady (Atlantic-Little Brown, 1978)—written with Gertrude Macy. Brother Toby, Sister Marti, and Sister Julie, whose mission at Starcross Community is a wonder of light out of darkness. Bishop Otis Charles, for his great personal courage in single-handedly changing the balance in the House of Bishops. Ma Jaya and her tireless workers at Kashi Ranch, for the blessings they’ve brought to a suffering people. Neil Baldwin, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation,
for uncountable kindnesses and efficiency in shepherding my lecture at the Library of Congress. The Op-Ed staff at The New York Times, where a portion of “The Politics of Silence” first appeared. Laurence Goldstein and the staff of the Michigan Quarterly Review, where “Mustering” first appeared. My doctors—especially James Thommes, Robert Jenkins, and Aaron Aronow—for keeping my head above water. And Barbara Horwitz, diagnostician sine qua non. Tony Johnson, for his gift of humor in calamitous times and the brave example of his own writing. Wendy Weil, my agent and friend for twenty years, for her staunch enthusiasm and her great heart. Finally, Drenka Willen, my editor at Harcourt Brace, for her intellectual rigor and unfailing good humor in the service of keeping me honest.

  A Biography of Paul Monette

  Paul Monette (1945–1995) was a prolific, award-winning American author and prominent AIDS activist. His novels, memoirs, and poetry gave shape to a volatile era in which gay men forging their new identities confronted the unforeseeable and devastating AIDS epidemic. Late in life, Monette wrote, “AIDS is the great cleave in the world, and nothing will ever be the same again.” A winner of the National Book Award for his memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Monette helped establish the broad cultural significance of gay and AIDS literature.

  Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1945, to Paul Monette Sr. and Jacqueline Monette, Paul was considered by all accounts “perfect.” Attending the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a “townie” on scholarship, he grew increasingly tormented by his suppressed homosexuality and the class divisions he observed all around him. In Becoming a Man, he describes those early years as a time in which he never lost his temper or raised his voice: “A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.”

  After graduating from Yale in 1967, Monette descended into a dispirited period. He reluctantly taught literature and writing at preparatory schools, such as Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, and a women’s liberal arts college outside Boston called Pine Manor. Around the time he published his first book of poems, The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975), Monette met a lawyer named Roger Horwitz at a dinner party. The two men fell in love and soon moved to Los Angeles. There, Monette left behind what he saw as the strictures of the East Coast establishment and came out unequivocally as a gay man. Over the next decade, he wrote several novels, such as Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979), that were influenced by Hollywood and its lore. His early novels featured openly gay men as central characters. Monette’s second book of poems, No Witnesses (1981), also appeared in these years; mostly dramatic monologues of fictitious and historical figures, the book received high critical praise from the literary world.

  While the sexual mores of the 1970s and early 1980s challenged his partnership with Roger Horwitz, the bond between the two men held. Before his death from AIDS-related complications, Horwitz declared to Monette, “We’re the same person. When did that happen?” It was Horwitz’s diagnosis of AIDS in 1985 that plunged Monette into a crisis that would come to define his mission as a writer and activist. His book of forceful, grief-stricken poems, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, and his highly lauded testimony, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, both appeared in 1988. The latter chronicled Horwitz’s illness and death and was among the first memoirs to bear witness to the epidemic’s devastating impact. New York Times reviewer William M. Hoffman celebrated the book, saying that Monette had “etched a magnificent monument to his lover’s bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure.”

  In the years that followed, Paul Monette turned his focus almost exclusively to writing books that confronted the terrible effects of the AIDS crisis and the closet. He published two more novels, Afterlife (1990), about “AIDS widowers” in Los Angeles, and Halfway Home (1991), a story of two brothers, one gay and facing AIDS, the other straight. His last book of poems, West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1995), garnered acclaim for its arresting, lyrical narratives of grief, anger, and loss. In 1992, Monette released what is now his best-known work, Becoming a Man. A memoir of his life leading up to meeting Horwitz, the book illustrates the costs of sexual repression and affirms the power of living life authentically. About Becoming a Man, novelist David Ebershoff has written, “Monette’s interior life, his ghosts, his turmoil, his final peace—in Becoming a Man, they have become our literature.”

  During the last seven years of his life, Monette became a vocal and influential AIDS and gay rights activist. With his partner Stephen Kolzak, whom he met and quickly lost to the epidemic, Monette participated in political protests against the federal government’s neglect of AIDS research and campaigned for the rights and social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. “No one will find the way out of hate and violence unless we do,” Monette declared in one of his many speeches from this time. “Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”

  As he grew increasingly ill from AIDS complications, Monette published Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994). Alternating between rage and remembrance as well as the personal and political, these ten essays offer insight into the life and mind of a powerful and determined writer galvanized by the injustices of his times. A film documentary of the author’s life, Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, was released in 1996. The slim, eloquent Sanctuary, a fable of same-sex love, posthumously appeared in 1997 and was hailed by critics as Monette’s final gift.

  He died at his home in Los Angeles on February 10, 1995, at the age of forty-nine and was survived by his father, brother, and final partner, Winston Wilde. Inscribed on his grave are the words Champion of His People.

  A two-year-old Paul Monette in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1947.

  Monette at his graduation from Yale University in 1967.

  The author on a Provincetown farm in 1973.

  Monette’s faculty photo in Milton Academy’s 1975 yearbook.

  The author with his mother, Jacqueline Monette; his father, Paul Monette Sr.; and his brother, Robert Monette in 1977.

  Monette in 1983 with his beloved first partner, Roger Horwitz, at the Monte Oliveto monastery in Tuscany. This was the original cover photo of Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.

  Monette and Horwitz in 1984.

  Monette and his second partner, Stephen Kolzak, wearing AIDS protest pins in 1990.

  Response stationery for Monette fans circa 1993.

  The author with his final companion, Winston Wilde, on Christmas in 1994.

  A promotional postcard for Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, a 1996 documentary on Monette.

  All images courtesy of the Paul Monette papers (Collection 1707). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1994, 1993 by Paul Monette, Trustee, and his Successor

  Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  Cover image credit: “Monette Early 90s, Paul Monette papers (Collection 1707). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.”

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